Children in the 1800s often worked long days starting before dawn to help support their families. Boys typically did farm work like collecting firewood, tending animals, and hunting. Girls took on tasks like cooking, cleaning, sewing clothes, and caring for younger siblings. Many children as young as 6 or 8 worked in mills, factories, or as servants. Education was in simple one-room schoolhouses with one teacher for all grades near where they lived. By 2005, nearly all of the 200,000 one-room schools from the 1800s had closed.

1. Life in the 1800s
Catherine Albanez
3ro A

2. • Everyone in your family tree was young once,
but childhood today is very different from
what it was a century or more ago. Before the
Victorian era, children as young as 6 or 8 years
old might work in a mill or factory, they might
run errands and make deliveries for a store
keeper, they may be apprenticed to a skilled
craftsman or woman, or they could be hired
out as a servant.

3. • Their work day started before the sun came up
and boys' tasks might include cutting, splitting, or
carrying firewood for the stove or fireplace,
tending to the farm animals, carrying water to the
house, putting up or repairing fencing, working in
the gardens, fields or orchards, and hunting,
trapping or fishing to provide food for the family.
Girls spent long days cooking, milking cows or
goats, collecting eggs, churning butter, making
breads and cheeses, preserving foods, cleaning,
doing laundry, making candles, sewing clothes for
the family, preparing fibers like wool and flax to
spin and weave, caring for younger brothers and
sisters and helping elderly family members.

4. • Children learned to read, write, and do math at
home or in a simple one room schoolhouse
where there was one teacher for all the grades.
Lots of towns had several of these
schoolhouses located in different parts of the
town, and children would attend the school
closest to where they lived. In 1919 there were
almost 200,000 of these one room schools
across the United States, but by 2005 there
were fewer than 400 still being used as
schools.